Page 7 of Christmas Criminal

"Then I'm not done until eight!"

I shake my head, throwing my hands out in front of me. "I'm trying to work with you here, Noelle. You have hours to do. Tell me what times work."

She shakes her head, running her hand over her face. "I'm sorry. I think I'm tired. I don't usually get up this early and I had a long week at work and I just... ugh. I swear, I have a visceral reaction every time I walk into this building, like I'm shrinking back into high school. And I hate that I'm giving up my weekend to come back here." She lets out a long breath, resting her hands on her hips. "I don't like being here and I'm throwing a tantrum over it." She bites her lip, her face tipping up toward the ceiling. "I'm sorry. You don't deserve that."

I cross my arms over my chest as I look at her, raising an eyebrow.

"What's your worst memory of being here?"

She grimaces. "Oh god, no. We're not going there. It's bad enough that I can feel it. I don't want to talk about it and make it more real than it is."

"Humor me. Let's see if we can end the feeling by talking it out really quick."

She raises an eyebrow. "Isn't this supposed to be community service?"

"If we're helping someone, it's community service."

She narrows her eyes. "Why would you want to help me instead of using me for manual labor?"

I shrug. "We have all day for manual labor."

She eyes me and then throws her hands out in front of her. "Okay, fine. When I was in high school, I used to have to sneak into the library over lunch to eat my food because I didn't have any friends so I had nowhere to sit in the lunchroom."

Thathits me in the gut.

"You had to sneak in?"

She nods. "You weren't allowed to go to the library without a pass, and they wouldn't give you a pass over lunch because they were scared you wouldn't eat or something. So there was this kid who swiped one of the teacher's passwords, and when he got onto the shared file system, he found a printout of the pass sheets that he shared with the whole school. So as long as you could find the right color paper and make your signature terrible enough, you could write your own passes for anything."

I blink, vaguely wondering if we use the same passes as we did when she went to school here.

And if my students are passing out copies of them.

"You came up with quite the solution."

She shrugs. "It didn't always work." She's quiet for a moment. "I think the librarian knew."

I raise my eyebrows. "Yeah?"

She nods. "Mrs. Nguyen."

A grin spreads across my face. "Mrs. Nguyen is still here."

She swallows. "Is she?"

I nod. "And she does seem like the type of woman who would figure out what's going on. She's sharp. Kind of scares me a little, if I'm being totally honest. Did she send you away?"

Noelle shakes her head. "She never did. But every single day, she would look at my pass and mention that my teacher's handwriting looked a little off, compared to the one I handed her the day before." She bites her lip and lowers her voice. "I kind of think she was doing it to fuck with me because every single day I tried harder and harder to forge it better, and I think all it did was make it a little different every day, just like she told me it was."

I can't help my snicker, and a moment later, Noelle is laughing along with me.

"You know, I hated high school, but Ididappreciate her. She used to let me check out more books than I was supposed to andevery once in a while she would slip one into my pile that she thought I'd like."

"You should come back during the week. Say hello to her. I'm sure she'd like to see you again."

Noelle scoffs, turning and continuing toward the garage. "Please. I put her in a terrible position. She probably had to feign ignorance about why I was in the library for lunch every day."

I take a few quick steps to catch up and knock her elbow with mine, the touch sending a little jolt through my skin that I wasn't expecting. When she turns those piercing brown eyes on me, I clear my throat. "You know, just because she was an adult doesn't mean she kneweverything. Speaking as one of the adults who has to take care of a bunch of teenagers all day, I feel clueless more often than not."

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